I recommend going for the thinkpad carbon x1, it's the same form factor of Mac air, looks better in my opinion and has one of the best keyboards on a laptop that size, not to mention it's developer friendly (has actual page up/down, home/end keys). I'm running Ubuntu on mine (3rd gen) without problems. The 4th gen ones can take 16gb ram as well.

I'm in a similar situation to yours and been reading some positive reviews about this https://slimbook.es/

They seem to be very responsive in terms of doubts, questions, etc. but as most small companies their main disadvantage is brand awareness when compared to Dell or Apple. But of course this is greatly compensated by a cheaper price.

If you have a Microsoft Store and Apple Store nearby, just go check them out in person and decide for yourself. I have both and prefer the XPS 13 hardware, mainly the high resolution display with almost no bezel, but both are great.

At the risk of sounding like a Carlsberg advert, XPS13 is probably the best laptop I have ever used (if not the best computer).

Still has windows 10 on it (my only windows machine) since I need occasionally to use the latest versions of office, and I use eclipse for the odd bit of programming I need to do away from my main dev machine (common workspace with linux is awesome).

Macbook Air was good, in 2008. couple of the staff use them.

Be aware, unlike the Macs the different versions of the XPS13 over the years are very different machines. Only this years model has the 14 hour battery life for example. But many stores (such as Amazon) stock old models.

I was actually commenting to collegues last week that Dell appear to have become the world leader in "real" computing - laptop, desktop and server. They have a lot of skeletons to shake though before they are perceived that way.

I would always recommend a MacBook. I used to always stick with various non-Macbook laptops (Sony, Samsung, Lenovo, etc). I switched to a MBP a few years ago and don't think I can go back. Have bought 5-6 different MacBooks since.

Yeah these days if you want a linux laptop you're going to have a better experience either installing linux under bootcamp on a macbook, or getting a laptop with linux pre-installed, or getting a chromebook and running ubuntu under crouton. The dual boot days are basically over. If you have windows often its boot load locked into windows10. You can run bash ubuntu under windows 10 now, but you still have the overhead of running windows10 itself compared to the speed and efficiency of running a linux desktop like xfce.

Barring different categories for downvotes, I strongly believe that a downvote should be reserved for cases where you think the comment does not contribute to the discussion. Disagreement should not be enough. If the issue is amenable to discussion, I'd much rather see someone type out a reply containing actual counterpoints than people simply downvoting (or worse: flagging) the parent. And if you find a well-written comment you disagree with, you might even upvote it and disagree in text form. I realize though that disagreement sometimes needs an outlet that can't be provided if a large number of replies already exist, but in that case you might just upvote the best existing reply that you feel captures your feelings.

I would advocate that downvotes be reserved for instances where the post was a net negative to the discussion, and flags should be reserved for egregious violations of conduct that call the originating user accounts itself into question.

Based on that, I think a score of -2 (is that the current limit?) and a few hours time limit is sufficient for the purpose of filtering the discussion. It should be ample time to weed out the low quality comments that should be sinking to the bottom. Once that basic weeding is done, upvoting is a much better signal to concentrate on.

It looks like it's set to 8 hours or so, which for those of use who regularly sleep 8 hours, plus avoid HN while getting ready for it or don't immediately go to it on waking up, means we don't get a chance to downvote a lot of postings that otherwise might make sense for us to be able to do so.

From my experience, the votes are rarely a sign of a constructive comment.

For example, my top comment is the one in which I basically said that learning natural languages is hard. Pretty original remark, huh? In my second most popular comment, I posted a link to a funny image that didn't have much to do with the conversation. And my most downvoted comment is a detailed explanation of why I'm not impressed with Twitter's plans to use advanced machine learning.

I am not arguing that we should abolish votes, since I don't see an alternative. But tweaking the existing system to see if it becomes better is a sensible idea.

Also, I would like to make a point that comments at the bottom of the thread aren't always off-topic and boring.

I also feel that moot a.k.a. Christopher Poole made a point for anonymity online. [0] In his talk he states that by eliminating voting mechanisms he ensures that every opinion has the same weight in a discussion, as simply chronology matters. The problem here is that power is shifted from the community to the moderators. But advantages are a)unpopular opinions aren't voted down into "inexistence" and b)the discussion starts out more unbiased as every opinion appears chronologically.

While we're on the topic, please eliminate downvoting, or at least the greying of text. It's antisocial and pointless.

Edit: Point proven. Two upvotes and seven downvotes in 12 minutes. Nothing short of a reply from `dang` will save it now! Bad commenter, toe the line if you seek discussion, lest you be banished to the graveyard of greydom. I'm baffled that nobody else sees how this is a problem.